Patricia Valle Elegido

LOVESONG

He loved her and she loved him.

His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to

He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6616&poem=30213, visited May 6^th , 2006

Ted Hughes

& Sylvia Plath

MAD GIRL’S LOVE SONG

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6642&poem=33188, visited May 6^th , 2006

I have chosen these two poems because if we take into account the fact that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married, I found it curious to know the way both authors talk about “love”. What I will try is to find personal information about each one’s personality and thoughts, and probably about their relationship inside each poem. And also, I will try to find some general similarities or differences between them in the way of talking about “love”.

The relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was not easy at all because of jealousy, but they loved each other so much and their rapport in the poetical sphere was always in their lives. Ted himself recognised in an interview that “[…]my background reading was utterly different from hers. But our minds soon became two parts of one operation. We dreamed a lot of shared or complementary dreams. Our telepathy was intrusive. I don't know whether our verse exchanged much, if we influenced one another that way - not in the early days. Our methods were not the same. My method was to find a thread end and draw the rest out of a hidden tangle. Her method was more painterly, mine more narrative, perhaps.” (Investigación – Literatura Inglesa 1)

As he has said at the end, their methods, their way of writing was different, and we will see it while we are reading these two poems.

The poem I chose from Ted Hughes is “Lovesong”, and it can help us understand the relationship between him and Sylvia Plath during their marriage. In the first reading we can realise that his concept of “love” in this poem is near to the concept of “passion”: “She bit him she gnawed him she sucked / She wanted him complete inside her / Safe and sure forever and ever / Their little cries fluttered into the curtains.” The line where he says: “She bit him…” probably refers directly to Sylvia Plath: “They first met at a student party, where she bit Hughes on the cheek, really hard. It set the tone to their tumultuous relationship.” (Sylvia Plath – biography)

Plath’s jealousy, as I have mentioned before, was one of the main reasons of the breakdown. Maybe Hughes felt “suffocated” or “strangled” by her jealousy, and the relationship reflected in this poem expresses in the third stanza all these ideas: “Her embrace was an immense press / To print him into her bones […]”. Although Ted Hughes was not characteristic for speaking about his own life in his poetry, Sylvia was, and Ted said once that “[…] maybe all poetry, in so far as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn't actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of …In all that, Sylvia was an extreme case, I think". (Investigación – Literatura Inglesa 1)

As regards Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”, we can see on first reading that she is expressing completely different from Ted Hughes. As well as Hughes’ perception of “love” in his poet was as “passion”, Plath saw “love” as if it was a “disease” or “madness”. The clearest example is in the title: “Mad Girl’s Love Song”. She repeats along the poem: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead” and “I think I made you up inside my head.”, the last one in brackets, and these structure makes the poem beautiful because it sounds like a soft song. The sentence in brackets “I think I made you up inside my head”, is another justification of her view of love as a madness, her madness about men or a man in concrete.

The poem has nothing to do with Ted Hughes because when she wrote this poem, she hadn’t met him yet. What she is expressing in the poem is her dreams and fears about love, maybe also reflected within her later relationship with Hughes. And I also think that when she says "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead" she is referring to her future first suicide attempt.

To Sylvia Plath, poetry is like her diary, all what she is saying in her poetry refers to some important events in her life, or her thoughts and feelings mostly influenced by these events. “Her strong and conflicting emotions of love, hate, anger and grief at the loss of her father were to affect Sylvia for the rest of her life.” (Neurotic Poets)

I think Sylvia is drawing in her mind a portrait of love or her ideal man that she almost felt like she had dreamed for all her life. This man consumed her thoughts and sometimes the rest of the world and even heaven and hell seemed insignificant to her: “God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: / Exit seraphim and Satan's men”. And after making this picture of love, “when she met Ted Hughes, she felt that life with him would be ideal”. But at the end of their relationship, what she might have felt was disappointment. (Two Views)

“Plath tried to make a new life for herself, but the worst winter in a century added to her depression. Without a telephone, ill, and troubled with the care of the two infants, she committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas inhalation on 11 February 1963.” And “in the quarter-century following her suicide Sylvia Plath has become a heroine and martyr of the feminist movement”, while her ex-husband ended as an “executioner” trying to save his reputation. (Two Views)

Although we know that both poems are not referred to each other, they give a glimpse to the way they thought about love, and knowing that, we can sense how their love was. Whereas Hughes sees love as a “trap”, something that doesn’t let you be free at all, Plath compares it with “insanity”, something that can drive you crazy.

I think if I had read each poem without knowing if the writer is a man or a woman, I would have thought that the writer could be a man or a woman in each one of the poems. Hughes’ one is more passionate, as if the act of love itself was a battle in which the woman tries to catch him, and women can be as passionate as him writing a poem although the “villain” would not be the woman. The same happens with Plath’s poem, it is very soft and sensitive, and a man can be as soft and as sensitive as her, but whereas in her poem, the “victim” is the woman, in a soft and sensitive man’s poem, the “victim” would be the man.

We can conclude with the clear idea that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had a completely different idea of “love”, but we can not attribute these differences to men and women in general. I think that everybody is unique, and each poet has his/her particular way of expressing himself/herself, although he/she had been influenced by one or more than one poet. The fact that one is a man and the other is a woman doesn’t mean at all that men and women are different in poetry, it just means that Ted and Sylvia themselves were different.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lovesong – Ted Hughes – Poem by

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6616&poem=30213, visited May 6^th , 2006

Mad Girl’s Love Song – Sylvia Plath – Poem by

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6642&poem=33188, visited May 6^th , 2006

Ted Hughes Homepage

http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/THHome.htm, visited May 6^th , 2006

Sylvia Plath Homepage (biography, etc)

http://www.sylviaplath.de, visited May 6^th , 2006

Last Modified: 19 Feb 2004

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – Article about Troubled Relationship of the Poets

http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html, visited May 6^th, 2006